The lunar modules’ ascending stages were also employed for seismology. The now useless spacecraft was discarded and ordered by Mission Control to crash the Moon’s surface at a precise spot near an ALSE after the lunar landing crew had transferred everything coming back to Earth from the lunar module and closed it out. One of these carefully orchestrated wrecks yielded some startlingly bizarre effects. The shock wave from Apollo 12’s lunar module Intrepid slamming with the lunar surface vibrated through the Moon for more than 55 minutes. The continuous propagation of the wave was subsequently attributed to the Moon’s dryness, as dry rocks did not damper the waves as effectively as they do on Earth.
Apollo 9, Apollo 10, and Apollo 13 were the three outliers. The lunar module of Apollo 9 burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere because it was an Earth orbital mission. Snoopy, the lunar module of Apollo 10, was launched into solar orbit and remains there today. On the way back to Earth, Apollo 13 used their lunar module Aquarius as a lifeboat, allowing it to burn up in the atmosphere during reentry.
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What happened to Apollo 13’s Aquarius Lem?
The initial plan for the Apollo 13 Lunar Module (LM or LEM) was to land in the Fra Mauro region of the Moon. The Apollo 13 lunar landing mission was abandoned two days after launch on April 13, 1970, when an oxygen tank on the Command and Service Module (CSM) overheated and exploded. Because the CSM could not provide life support, the LM, which was meant to support two men for 45 hours, was used as a lifeboat to house the three astronauts (Commander James A. Lovell Jr., CSM pilot John L. Swigert Jr., and LM pilot Fred W. Haise Jr.) for 90 hours. For the duration of the voyage, energy and water usage were dramatically reduced, and the CM lithium hydroxide cannisters, which were used to scrub carbon dioxide from the air, were converted for use on the LM. The LM descent engine was used to speed the spacecraft around the Moon and back to Earth as the Apollo 13 proceeded on to the Moon. The astronauts returned to the Command Module for reentry after the LM was discarded soon before reaching Earth. The LM re-entered the atmosphere over the southwest Pacific and burned up, with any remaining fragments crashing into the deep ocean off the coast of New Zealand.
Lunar Module Spacecraft and Subsystems
The lunar module was a two-stage spacecraft that was planned to conduct operations near and on the Moon. The mass of the LM was 15,188 kg, which included crew, expendables, and 10,691 kg of propellants. The LM’s ascent and descent stages worked together until staging, at which point the ascent stage became a single spacecraft for rendezvous and docking with the command and service module (CSM). The descending stage was an octagonal prism 4.2 meters across and 1.7 meters thick that made up the lowest half of the spaceship. The bottom of the descent stage was suspended 1.5 meters above the surface by four landing legs with spherical footpads installed on the sides of the stage. On opposing landing legs, the distance between the ends of the footpads was 9.4 meters. A small astronaut egress platform and ladder were built into one of the legs. From the stage’s bottom, a one-meter-long conical descending engine skirt protruded. The landing rocket, two tanks of aerozine 50 fuel, two tanks of nitrogen tetroxide oxidizer, water, oxygen, and helium tanks, and storage space for lunar equipment and experiments, as well as the lunar rover in the case of Apollo 15, 16, and 17. The fall stage was created to serve as a launch pad for the ascent stage from the Moon.
The climb stage was a 2.8-meter-high, 4.0-by-4.3-meter-wide irregularly shaped unit mounted on top of the fall stage. The astronauts were housed in a 6.65 cubic meter pressurized crew compartment on the ascent stage. On one side, there was an ingress-egress gate, and on top, there was a docking hatch for connecting to the CSM. A parabolic rendezvous radar antenna, a steerable parabolic S-band antenna, and two in-flight VHF antennas were also placed along the top. Above and to either side of the egress hatch were two triangular windows, and four thrust chamber assemblies were positioned around the sidewalls. The ascending engine located at the very bottom of the unit. The stage also had tanks for helium, liquid oxygen, gaseous oxygen, and reaction control fuel, as well as an aerozine 50 fuel and oxidizer tank. In the LM, there were no seats available. A control console was situated above the ingress-egress hatch and between the windows in the front of the crew compartment, with two more control panels mounted on the side walls. At the conclusion of lunar surface operations, the ascent stage was to be launched from the Moon, returning the men to the CSM.
A deep-throttling ablative rocket with a maximum thrust of around 45,000 N was installed on a gimbal ring in the center of the descent stage as the descent engine. The ascension engine was a constant-thrust, fixed-thrust rocket with a thrust of around 15,000 N. The reaction control system, which comprised of four thrust modules, each with four 450 N thrust chambers and nozzles pointing in separate directions, was used to maneuver. The S-band antenna was used for telemetry, TV, voice, and range communications with Earth. The astronauts and the LM, as well as the LM and the circling CSM, communicated through VHF. Both S-band and VHF tranceivers and equipment were redundant. The electronics and cabin were kept at a constant temperature thanks to an environmental management system that regenerated oxygen. Six silver-zinc batteries provided power. A radar ranging system, an inertial measurement unit with gyroscopes and accelerometers, and the Apollo guidance computer provided guidance and navigation control.
What happened to the command module of Apollo 13?
The Apollo 13 mission is the most well-known of the Apollo missions, following Apollo 11. Apollo 13 did not reach the surface of the moon due to a severe hardware failure in the oxygen tank; instead, the lunar landing was aborted in favor of a short voyage to attempt and safely return the three astronauts to Earth. Jim Lovell (also Apollo 8), Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise became acquainted with their Command Module “During their five-day journey, they did exceptionally well with “Odyssey.”
The Apollo 13 Command Module is currently on exhibit at the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, Kansas. “Odyssey” can be found in the Hall of Space’s Apollo Gallery. The Justice Planetarium also has a night sky show and the Carey Digital Dome Theater has a space movie.
Is the eagle in orbit around the Moon still?
The Eagle was abandoned in lunar orbit when the crew re-boarded Columbia. Although its eventual destiny is unclear, physicist James Meador’s simulations released in 2021 suggested that Eagle may conceivably still be in lunar orbit.
Is Jim Lovell still alive and kicking?
This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of Apollo 13’s ill-fated voyage to the moon.
It was supposed to be the third mission to land American astronauts on the moon’s surface, but the three-man crew of Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise encountered a problem not long into the mission. Their spaceship was severely damaged by an oxygen tank explosion 200,000 miles from Earth.
“At first, I had no idea what had happened,” Lovell says Houston Matters senior producer Michael Hagerty.
Lovell looked at his two crew members and realized that they, too, had no notion. Swigert said something that would be misquoted and connected with Houston for the rest of his life, for better or evil.
“Swigert said through radio conversation with Mission Control, “OK Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” Lovell added his two cents when NASA requested them to repeat themselves.
The problem rapidly manifested itself: the vehicle’s command module’s typical supply of electricity, water, and light was cut off. Lovell noticed a vapor leaking from the side of the spacecraft when he looked out the window.
“It didn’t take much for me to figure out that the gas exiting was oxygen,” he remarked. “So there was the final nail in the coffin.”
The original journey to the moon was aborted in an instant, while crews in Houston worked feverishly around the clock to safely return the men.
At the time he led that trip, Lovell was essentially NASA’s most experienced astronaut. He claims that being calm and cheerful while dealing with each obstacle as it arose was the key to his team’s success under duress.
“We’d still be up there waiting for a miracle if we’d been hoping for one,” he remarked.
The terrible account was made into a film in 1995 starring Tom Hanks as Captain Lovell, titled Apollo 13.
When most people think of Lovell, they think of Tom Hanks. Lovell stated that he is fine with it.
Lovell thought the movie was fairly realistic, but when it came to the famous and notorious in Bayou City statement, he disagreed “Houston, we’ve got a problem,” Lovell said, adding that his only regret is that he didn’t trademark it.
Despite the fact that the expedition did not fulfill its primary goal, he remembers it fondly.
“We declared it a successful failure shortly after that flight,” Lovell remarked. “I believe it will go down in history as one of the most significant moments in American spaceflight. It will also stand out as a success to see how the two sides Mission Control working closely with the flight crew converted a failure into a success by taking an apparently insurmountable difficulty and turning it into a success.”
Lovell has four space trips under his belt and has been awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor as well as the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He resides in a Chicago suburb at the age of 92.
Why wasn’t James Lovell given leadership of the mission?
Lovell was chosen as a potential astronaut candidate for Project Mercury, but he was rejected down due to an abnormally high level of bilirubin in his blood, which could have indicated a liver condition. “I have five men out there who don’t have a bilirubin problem, and 26 more on the way who probably don’t,” Lovell wrote in “Lost Moon” in response to his protests to NASA.
However, when NASA began recruiting astronauts for the Gemini and Apollo missions in 1962, Lovell was chosen for the Gemini program.
Is there still an American flag on the Moon?
The American flags placed in the Moon’s soil by Apollo astronauts are generally still standing, according to images collected by a Nasa spacecraft. The flags, with the exception of the one planted during the Apollo 11 mission, are still casting shadows in photographs taken by the Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter (LRO).